The Right’s Performative Toughness
Can you build an entire ideology based on faux tough guy bullshit?
I’m back in The Dispatch this week with a piece analyzing how MAGA’s political instincts - both online and in the real world, both at the top and at the bottom of the movement - are built around performative tough guy imagery.
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Last week, the Department of Defense renamed itself the Department of War. Never mind that the department’s name is prescribed by Congress and can’t actually be changed by presidential fiat. The Trump administration and its allies made a big show of renaming the department anyway, with a social media blitz emphasizing WAR in capital letters and a speech from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in which he recited slam poetry about how he wanted “maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.”
The administration clarified that the department’s legal name was still Defense (they’re seeking congressional approval for the name change). Until then, War is being used as a “secondary title,” making this pointless exercise the MAGA equivalent of changing your pronouns. It’s the latest absurdity to come out of the Trump administration, and hardly the most consequential.
But it is part of a troubling trend. Today’s right-wing politics don’t revolve around results or competence, nor even an identifiable ideology. The central organizing principle of the Trumpian right—to the extent that there is an organizing principle other than “Do things that benefit Donald Trump personally”—is the performance of toughness and the pantomime of warrior culture.
Once you start looking for this performative toughness, it’s everywhere in the MAGA movement.
It starts at the top of the food chain. Trump has exclaimed about beating up protesters and has mused about shooting them. He makes a big deal of parading the military around—sometimes with actual parades, sometimes by having troops meander around American cities. Trump’s immigration enforcers love to make a big show of arresting immigrants with as much theatricality as possible, like when they put hundreds of South Koreans working to open a Hyundai plant in Georgia in chains last week and released a slick video promoting the raid.
Trump’s behaviors also filter down to his subordinates…
Trump having zero sum world view is a well known fact but these days, the MAGA movement feels not even zero sum it’s negative sum - they care way more about harming whoever they see as an oppressor than them gaining something from that.
In fact, I start to suspect they may think “idc if I take some loss from it, I want to harm someone who wronged me”.
And these are the ppl who have real pains but their headspace is occupied by taking the righteous revenge to those who wrong them rather than actually solving the pain.
Now i feel like I understand why ppl like Kanye and Elon despite their success is attracted to this type of politics. I think their pain is very real and they both have mental health issues but instead of working to solve it, they resort to taking the revenge on whatever or whoever wronged them…
Yeah, I've been calling this "tough guy cosplay." Same shit we all saw in the schoolyard. All bark, no bite.